In his forthcoming book Literature for a Changing Planet (Princeton University Press, 2022), scholar Martin Puchner situates Gilgamesh in a broader comparative history that characterizes world literature as "an archive of environmental exploitation and a product of a way of life responsible for climate change," depending on "millennia of intensive agriculture, urbanization, and resource extraction, from the clay of ancient tablets to the silicon of e-readers." What strikes me as revelatory in Puchner's book is his convincing claim that literature itself is coeval-and in certain senses complicit-with the rise of cities and their role in exacerbating climate change. In the central episodes, Gilgamesh befriends Enkidu, and they embark on a quest to murder Humbaba, the keeper of the sacred Cedar Forest, then kill the Bull of Heaven sent to punish them.